Shannon Love

An Island People in a Sea of Humanity

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This Forbes article talks about China being an empire, i.e., a polity composed of many different ethnic groups but trying to behave as a nation, i.e., a polity based around a single ethnic group. [h/t Instapundit] This reminded me of a mock map at the very interesting blog Strange Maps.

The map below combines the distribution of China’s ethnic Han population (the people we think of as Chinese) with China’s geographic isolation to produce an image of the Han inhabiting an island surrounded by a sea of non-Han peoples.

china-island-400_2

This post accompanying the map makes several very good points:

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Sheeple

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sheeple

From xkcd

We all seem possessed by the fear we are not special. We cannot emotionally tolerate that each of us apprehends only a tiny piece of  reality. We create a fantasy in which whatever special piece of knowledge we believe we possess grants us a superior understanding as compared to all others. This fantasy lets us view ourselves as deserving a higher status in society than all others.  

Some people build political ideologies around this fantasy.  

The Neo-Nazi Boogyman

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The Mudville Gazette [h/t Instapundit] reports:

Morris Dees, the founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center, says researchers have identified 40 personal profiles of people who list the military as their occupation on the Web site New Saxon.
 
The site is run by the Detroit-based National Socialist Movement and describes itself as an “online community for whites by whites.” Its leader, Jeff Schoep, says site operators remove any violent comments they find.
 
Dees sent a letter to four congressional committee chairs asking for an investigation.

I can see why this requires a congressional investigation. Forty members of a racist site  claiming to belong to the military  represent  a serious problem. After all, there are only  1,473,900 active service personnel and only  1,458,500 reservists so if there are 40 white  supremacists that  means that a staggering 1 in every 36,847 active service personnel is a white  supremacist! Clearly, this is a pants wetting emergency requiring immediate Congressional attention!

Okay, it doesn’t.

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Overselling Science

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This post at Reason’s Hit & Run  links to a Pew study that shows a divergence between the views of scientists and the  laity  on such matters as evolution, global warming and nuclear power. The study also shows that scientists blame the general public’s ignorance of science for the divergence. I think that scientists themselves are to blame because they too often oversell weak science.  

The problem with polling “scientists” is that there is a wide divergence in the predictive power of different fields of study that we lump together as “science”. For example, physics has tremendous predictive power but sociology has almost none. Worse, scientists in highly predictive fields tend to project their own fields’ predictive power onto less predictive fields, and scientists in low-predictive fields try to parasitize the public’s trust in highly predictive fields.  

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It’s Worse Than Mere Corruption

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At USA Today via Instapundit:

Counties that supported Obama last year have reaped twice as much money per person from the administration’s $787 billion economic stimulus package as those that voted for his Republican rival, Sen.  John McCain, a USA TODAY analysis of government disclosure and accounting records shows. That money includes aid to repair military bases, improve public housing and help students pay for college.

 

The reports show the 872 counties that supported Obama received about $69 per person, on average. The 2,234 that supported  McCain  received about $34.

The article spends a lot of time explaining that there is no  evidence  that the distribution of the “stimulus” money occurred owing to  favoritism  or political corruption. I think that is true. If nothing else, the stimulus was rammed through so quickly I don’t there was time for corrupt allocation on such a scale.  

The real  explanation  is much, much worse.

This pattern reveals that the Democrats have created a hardwired system that automatically takes from Republican-leaning areas and gives to Democrat-leaning areas. This means that people in those areas don’t have to be convinced with intellectual arguments to vote for Democrats, because they will do so automatically out of economic self-interest.  People vote for Obama because they expect themselves and their immediate communities to  receive  money taken from areas that didn’t vote for Obama.  

Corruption can be fought by bringing down corrupt individuals. A legal, hardwired distribution system that creates an incentive for one group of citizens to loot other citizens is a much more serious and intractable problem.

[edit (2009-06-09 3:18pm) expanded quote to show per capita spending.]